~ Rambling and dabbling in books of all sorts.

Anil’s Ghost, Michael Ondaatje

She arrived in early March, the plane landing at Katunayake airport before the dawn. They had raced it ever since coming over the west coast of India, so that now passengers stepped onto the tarmac in the dark.

This is another good book by Ondaatje. I think his writing is really great when he writes about Sri Lanka; Anil’s Ghost and The Cat’s Table were much better than The English Patient, which didn’t have anything to do with Sri Lanka. In Anil’s Ghost, Anil Tissera, a Sri-Lankan born young woman educated in the US and Europe, returns to Sri Lanka to investigate an organized rash of murders throughout the whole island. What follows is a really great and gripping story. And it’s set against the backdrop of Sri Lanka’s culture and landscape. I loved the character of Anil, and Ondaatje’s writing style is compelling too. It’s quite distinctive, though hard to describe. I guess it has a certain almost dream-like quality to it.